I sometimes think that, by the time I die, my entire life will have been blighted by sterile, unresolved arguments about Europe. I have to admit that the foundation of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951 made little impression on me at the time; but I was only 11 years old, Britain wasn’t
I was in my garden office on Monday afternoon when I heard a loud noise behind me, as if someone had jumped over the back fence. Seconds later, a strange man walked past the window. I emerged gingerly from my office and found myself face to face with a giant. At first glance, he looked
I am on my first ever visit to Sweden and enjoying it greatly. My idea of this country had recently become rather confused. I used to picture it as a social democratic paradise, a tolerant, law-abiding welfare state in which everyone was a good and caring citizen. But then came the Wallander television series and
Working partnerships don’t always bring the results expected. I heard lately of a 12-year-old girl encouraged to spend a day on work experience with a relative in the building trade. After a day sorting correspondence, tidying files and making cups of tea on demand, young Emily returned home with a crisp ten pound note. Her
Last week saw the launch of the Bad Grammar Awards, an annual contest in which prizes are handed out for poor English. Actually, ‘prizes’ is probably the wrong word since no one wants to win them. No one, that is, apart from A.A. Gill. He entered himself and submitted a badly written email that he’d
I’m just back from a week in Italy where a grand political comedy playing in Rome has at least been some compensation for the poor weather and the general economic gloom. Giorgio Napolitano, the 87-year-old former communist who had been looking forward to retiring after his seven-year stint as President of the Republic, was not
People often ask how I get away with writing about my wife so often. Doesn’t Caroline mind being cast as the matronly foil to my errant schoolboy? I’d love to say that she perches on my shoulder, chortling with pleasure as she vets every word, but the truth is she never bothers to read any
The long, intermittent debate about whether parents should be allowed to spank their children has erupted once again with the finding by an American research team that it doesn’t do children any harm provided it is tempered by love. Whether it does them any good is another matter, and it’s not really the point; for
The trouble with writing about people is their friends. Back when woolly mammoths roamed the earth and I was Crossbencher in the Sunday Express, I wrote admiringly about the burgeoning prospects of a young MP. He was of Dutch origin and I suggested that he might become the first Hollander to lead the British Labour
The highlight of the year I spent as a postgraduate at Harvard was a speech given by Tom Wolfe to the graduating class of 1988. His theme was the decline of Christianity in America and the extraordinary freedom that had given rise to. Until quite recently in American history, he argued, people’s personal behaviour had
One of the sculptures at the British Museum’s splendid Pompeii exhibition shows four ferocious dogs attacking a stag as it awaits its bloody death with quiet resignation. It is a beautiful work of art, brilliantly carved from a single slab of marble, but potentially shocking today because it appears to rejoice at the prospect of
For several years now, I’ve been going to Cornwall for a week during the Easter Holidays — usually to Bude in North Cornwall. Bude has the advantage of being working class and unpretentious, so you’re unlikely to bump into any Guardian readers. My children and I can sit on the beach, tucking into our McDonald’s
As it happens, a male wild boar can weigh roughly what Luciano Pavarotti weighed when he was alive — about 330lbs, or more than 23 stone. But unlike the gentle Pavarotti, wild boars throw their weight about in the most destructive fashion. I know a bit about this because, more than 40 years ago, my
Talking to a shipboard audience last week about the perils of journalism, I warned that the biggest danger of our trade was making assumptions. I had in mind my favourite story from CNN days of the cameraman who dashed to the local airfield where he had been told a light plane awaited him to take
On a warm summer evening in 1986, the crème-de-la-crème of London’s literary establishment met at Antonia Fraser’s house in Holland Park to discuss how they could bring about the downfall of Margaret Thatcher. Among their number were Harold Pinter, Ian McEwan, John Mortimer, David Hare, Margaret Drabble, Michael Holroyd, Angela Carter and Salman Rushdie, who
Always on the lookout for new heart-wrenching tales of animal suffering, the press has seized upon the news that a great many British horse-riders are too fat for their mounts. In the quaint words of the Sunday Telegraph, this puts horses ‘at risk of several welfare conditions’, including back pain, lameness and general bad temper.
According to a new survey commissioned by the BBC, Britain is now divided into seven different social classes. The good news, dear reader, is that you’re almost certainly at the top of the pyramid in the class the BBC calls the ‘social elite’. Members of this group own houses worth, on average, £325,000 and their
Apart from the weather, which has been so relentlessly horrible that it now deservedly takes precedence in the headlines over even our desperate economic plight, this is turning out to be rather an encouraging time for the old. I do not underestimate how badly the freezing weather affects us. My Jack Russell, Polly, won’t even
Nothing hurts quite so much as the ones that get away. Unable to be at Cheltenham’s Festival the day the improving Holywell, one of this column’s Twelve to Follow, was running in the Pertemps Final, I had assumed I would be able to phone in my bets. Alas, where I was I had no access
On the face of it, Game of Thrones doesn’t look very good. The HBO television series, based on a sequence of fantasy novels by George R.R. Martin, is set in a fictional, medieval kingdom called Westeros where various ambitious men do battle for the Iron Throne. It features dragons, zombies and dwarves, and has a